Anyone had problems with Eldritch?

To everyone who has concerns about Eldritch
Please rest assured we are still here (although no longer where we used to be). Moving has been a tortuous process to say the least. We lost the phone lines, the broadband system, had no mobile phone signals (without going 2 miles outside the village), eventually managed to pick up e-mails but couldn't send any for some reason, had numerous problems with deliveries because drivers couldn't find us (would have helped if they hadn't gone to the town at the centre of our postcode, 15 miles away), had couriers fail to turn up on numerous occasions and, to cap it all, one of our kids was out of school for 6 months and recently managed to get himself excluded!

So we're not happy bunnies, but we're probably happier than a lot of our customers. We can only apologise profusely for all the problems and the lack of communication. Please feel free to complain to Simon when you see him at events. We've almost completely cleared our backlog. However, I appreciate that some people want refunds. If that's the case, please bear in mind that we don't keep your credit card details, so please phone from a place that's safe to give out card details by phone so that we can sort it out for you. The phones are now working (although the kids are also now off for half term). That being said, our office-based credit card machine just died so we're waiting for a new one. Give us a couple of days.

But most importantly, we're still very much in business, still attending events as Eldritch (not to be confused with Having A Larp, who are a separate company and have been for over a year), and desperately trying to catch up with over 300 e-mails, an answer machine that apparently only pretends to record messages and the problems caused by the postal strike.

Finally, we don't have any orders here that are more than two months old, so if you've been waiting 5 months, it's lost in the post and we need to sort it out. So please phone with your real world names and I'll be happy to try to sort it out for you.

These have pretty much still been the issues apart from the PDQ machine which was replaced. We've faced several all day power cuts and telephone system shutdowns of the entire village, an answer machine that didn't want to work and didn't want to tell me so, an over-enthusiastic spam filter, web hosts who charged us an extortionate monthly fee but didn't actually do anything for it (we had to pay them to change our address on the site and then they only changed it in one place) but got shirty when we changed hosts and shut us down a month early, a post office that decided it wouldn't take our parcels, things not being delivered when they did finally accept them, couriers who couldn't find us but chose just not to turn up rather than bothering to phone to find out that they were in Spalding and we most certainly aren't, delivery drivers who tried to deliver to a local farm and therefore sent our orders back to our suppliers which we didn't find out until we phoned the suppliers to chase the delivery (on one particular order of foam, that happened 3 times). The list goes on.

On top of that, our younger son is now in a special needs unit so he's in school all day (40 miles away by taxi), which means we can both finally work full time. To be honest, that was the hardest bit of all because you simply can't work with an 8 year old with severe behavioural difficulties under your feet all day. We've all got over the various colds and flu that turned the house into a plague pit over the whole of December. I hesitate to do a Clarkson and say "what could possibly go wrong", but whilst we're still in the woods, we are at least at the very edge.

I hope that's helped assuage some concerns. Feel free to e-mail or PM if it doesn't.